The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [156]
A brief fear seemed to pass across his face, and he hesitated.
Then he gasped in pain and surprise, stumbling, and she saw an arrow standing from his shoulder. He dropped his bow, groaning loudly, and the other man started shouting.
“Stand away, Comarré, and the rest of you, too,” a new voice said. Anne saw the owner, farther up the hill—a man in late middle age, with a seamed, sun-browned face and black hair gone half-silver. “These ladies don’t seem to like you.”
“Damn you, Artoré,” the man with the arrow in his shoulder gritted. “This no business of yours. I saw first.”
“My boys and I are making it our business,” the older man replied.
Their attackers backed away. “Yes, fine,” Comarré said. “But another day, Artoré.”
At that, an arrow hit him in the throat, and he dropped like a sack of grain. The other two had time to cry out, and then Anne found herself staring at three corpses.
“No other day, Comarré,” Artoré said, shaking his head.
Anne looked up at him.
“I’m sorry you had to see that, ladies,” he said. “Are you well?” He stepped closer.
Anne grabbed Austra and hugged her tightly. “What do you want?” she asked. “Why did you kill them?”
“They’ve had it coming for a long time,” the man said. “But just now I figure that if I let them go, they’ll go tell that pack of Hansan knights, then they come looking for me, burn down my house—no good.”
“You mean you aren’t taking us to them?”
“Me? I hate knights and I hate Hansans. Why would I do anything for them? Come, it’s dark soon, and I think you’re hungry, no?”
Anne numbly followed the man named Artoré along a rutted road delimited by juniper and waxweed, into the hilly country that stretched beyond sight of the river. There they were quickly joined by four boys, all armed with bows. The setting sun lay behind them, and their shadows ran ahead in the subdued dusk. Swallows cut at the air with crescent wings, and Anne wondered once again exactly what had happened in the horz, why the knights hadn’t seen them.
They strolled past empty fields and thatch-roofed houses built of brick. Artoré and his boys chatted amongst themselves and exchanged greetings with their neighbors as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
“This is Jarné,” Artoré informed her, patting a spindly, tall young man on the shoulder. “He’s the eldest, twenty-five. Then there’s Cotomar, the one with the chicken nest in his hair. Locheté, he’s the one with the big ears, and Senché is the youngest.”
“I didn’t thank you,” Anne said guardedly.
“Why should you? Figured we were going to take you to town, just like Comarré planned. Eh?”
“Are the knights still in town?” Anne asked.
“Some of them. Some of them are out in the countryside, and three of them went east with a couple of fellows they had all tied up.”
“Cazio!” Austra gasped.
“Friends of yours, I take it.”
“Yes,” Anne said. “We were following them, hoping for a chance at rescue.”
Artoré laughed at that. “I wonder how you thought you were going to manage that.”
“We have to try,” Anne said. “They saved our lives, and as you said, they are our friends.”
“But against men like that? You’re braver than you are smart. Why do they want you?”
“They want to kill me, that is all I know,” Anne said. “They’ve chased us all the way from Vitellio.”
“Where are you trying to get to?”
Anne hesitated. “Eslen,” she finally said.
He nodded. “That’s what I figured. That’s still a long way, though, and it’s not the direction they’re taking your friends. So which way will you go?”
Anne had been thinking about that a lot, since Cazio and z’Acatto had been captured. It was her duty to go back to Eslen, she knew that. But she also had a duty to her friends. As long as their captors had been headed north, she hadn’t been forced to choose. Now she was, and she knew without a doubt which choice her mother—and the Faiths—would call the right one.
The thing was, whichever way she chose, she didn’t have much chance of surviving, not with Austra as a companion.
“I don’t know,”